At The Mountains Of Madness

Image: Cover of Poe book with Antarctic theme

(Conspiracy Nation, 05/03/05) -- The pace of shrinkage of Antarctic glaciers has been accelerating. Especially during the past five years has the shrinkage been rapid.

Antarctica is a continent, an enormous land area covered by ice. As its snowy cover disappears, what might this continent reveal? Easter Island-type statues? Stonehenge-type ruins?

This farthest southern land has long been a blank slate inviting speculation. In Edgar Allan Poe's strange novel, The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket, the adventurer finds that, beyond a certain latitude, the climate begins to get warmer! This echoes claims in a later book, The Hollow Earth, by Dr. Raymond Bernard. Dumbrova, a Russian explorer, is therein quoted as referring to, "The memorable December 12th discovery of heretofore unknown land beyond the South Pole by Capt. Sir George Hubert Wilkins." F. Amadeo Giannini confirmed "indeterminable land extent" at the South Pole in his suppressed 1959 book, Worlds Beyond The Poles.

Building upon Poe's earlier work, H.P. Lovecraft told a fantastic tale in his, At The Mountains Of Madness. An antarctic expedition finds a cyclopean lost city dating from before pre-Cambrian times. Two explorers investigating weird hieroglyphics in underground caverns encounter blind, 6-foot tall albino penguins. Unearthed is evidence of a long-gone alien civilization, which had retreated to the polar region. Deep underground, a final discovery drives one of the explorers insane and they both narrowly escape with their lives.

But pari passu with such fanciful tales arose other polar prose not definitively fictional. With such accounts, it is uncertain where fact ends and fiction begins. The essential guidebook to various intriguing literature regarding Antarctica is Joscelyn Goodwin's Arktos: The Polar Myth (1993). Mentioned is a German Antarctic expedition to Queen Maud Land in 1938-1939 which discovered "a group of low-lying hills sprinkled with many lakes and completely free of ice and snow." A later key incident was the surrender, in 1945, at Mar del Plata, Argentina, of a German submarine, U-530. This surrender is also covered in Reich of the Black Sun by Joseph P. Farrell. Grand Admiral Karl Donitz is reported to have stated, in 1943, that "the German submarine fleet is proud of having built for the Fuhrer, in another part of the world, a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable fortress." Later, at the Nuremberg trials, Admiral Donitz boasted of "an invulnerable fortress, a paradise-like oasis in the middle of eternal ice."

In 1946, the U.S. government proceeded with urgency to launch a military expedition to Antarctica: "Operation Highjump." The operation was commanded by Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd. The expedition "encircled the German claimed territory of Neuschwabenland (New Schwabialand)." Following aerial reconnaisance by Byrd and others, in which four escort craft vanished, the project was abruptly halted. "Byrd was returned to Washington DC, debriefed, and his personal and operational logs remain classified to this day..." (Farrell, op. cit.)

But before the apparent clampdown, odd reports appeared briefly, for example in the Chilean newspaper, El Mercurio. Farrell, in his book, reproduces a photostat of the article, dated March 5, 1947, by Lee van Atta, who had accompanied Byrd. A portion of the article is translated as follows: "Byrd announced to me today that it is necessary for the United States to put into effect defensive measures against enemy airmen which come from the polar regions. The Admiral further explained that he did not have the intention to scare anyone but the bitter reality is that in case of a new war the United States would be in a position to be attacked by flyers which could fly with fantastic speed from one pole to another."

Conspiracy Nation translates other portions of the El Mercurio article as follows:

Byrd's remarks are cryptic: do they warn of the need to defend against future weapons technology or against something already present at the time?

Iconoclastic magazine editor Ray Palmer commented on discoveries made by Byrd, quoting him as having stated, "We have penetrated an unknown and mysterious land which does not appear on today's maps." Again, the statement is either relatively mundane, or it is laced with deeper significance.

Some further sources summarized by Goodwin in his excellent overview of "the polar myth" are...

Return now to the noncommital news that shrinkage of Antarctic glaciers has been accelerating. A blip on the radar screen to many; evidence of environmental problems to some; fraught with potential meaning to a few: Is something cooking there, at the mountains of madness?

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Conspiracy Nation
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html